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Hoggatt sees Fibonacci everywhere. "The piano octave," he notes with satisfaction, "has eight white keys—five black keys and 13 keys altogether," all Fibonacci numbers. "I always use parking lot eight at school and I watch my Fibonacci numbers on the stock market too." Brother Alfred recently took 40 math teachers on a nature walk, collecting pine cones and counting the number of spirals on each. He has lovingly described other expeditions and his findings in the Quarterly.
Both the association and its magazine may well be bolstered by the recent appearance of a lengthy Fibonacci article in Scientific American, which is widely circulated in the mathematical community. Once they learn about the Fibonacci sequence, says Brother Alfred, "people tend to find an esthetic satisfaction in it. They think that there's some kind of mystical connection between these numbers and the universe."